Tuesday, September 18, 2012

Last week, I introduced Project Murdock with a code giveaway. Basically, PM is a reader engagement system which allows you to reward your readers. It does this through Missions, which are things like visiting a link and leaving a comment. All of these are tracked and your readers are given points which they can redeem for good stuff.

What went well

1) It worked! I received very little in the way of reported problems. Readers were able to cplete their missions, redeem the points and obtain a code. On the backend, things went very smoothly too, so I am quite happy.

2) It drove traffic. One of my main goals for PM is to be able to better drive visitors to other places in the community. In this case I picked Tarelther's videos and 6v6v6.com. I hope I gave them some increased exposure, although 6v6v6.com probably gave me more than I gave it :)

What didn't go so well

1) The first batch of codes had expired. This is totally my fault as I had them for a while and never considered that they would expire. Thankfully, the Mythic team was quick to bail me out and provided a batch a new and better codes.

2) The missions were limited. There were only a few missions available, and only a single reward. In the future I'd like to offer more mission and reward choices. For the test though, it was fine since it confirmed the pieces of the system worked.

3) The widget is just plain ugly. It needs to be brought into the 21st century pronto. I've already started work on that and you should see the results soon.

What's Next?

I'm currently preparing for the next test. It will feature more missions (Twitter), more reward choices and a better widget. Beyond that, I have a 3rd test being planned which will have some really cool rewards and also open the system up for people to use on their sites.

Finally, I want to say thank you to everyone who helped test the system. Thanks also go out to BioWare Mythic for the codes and the Facebook post!